I lead Citrix (NASDAQ:CTXS) world wide advocacy efforts with a particular focus on increasing the volume, reach and influence of Citrix's extensive portfolio of cloud solutions used by more than 260,000 customers and 100 million end users across the globe.

I'm recognized as an early innovator in the cloud computing space, as the founder of Enomaly in 2004 (Acquired by Virtustream in 2012). Enomaly was among the first to develop a self-service infrastructure as a service (IaaS) platform (ECP) circa 2005, as well as SpotCloud (2011) the first commodity style cloud computing Spot Market.

Accenture's Cloud Business Already at $1 Billion-a-year, Aims to Become Industry's Cloud Broker

I was just reading an interesting post over at Information Age which outlines AccentureAccenture’s ambitious plan to position itself as the IT industry’s “cloud broker.” The strategy is part of a broader plan that sees the consulting company investing upwards of $400 million in new cloud computing capabilities. According to the story, the Accenture Cloud Platform will be part of what the company describes as a plan to grow its more than 6,700 cloud focused experts and related cloud services.

The term cloud broker seems to be thrown around a lot lately. TechTarget defines it as “a third-party individual or business that acts as an intermediary between the purchaser of a cloud computing service and the sellers of that service. The broker’s role may simply be to save the purchaser time by researching services from different vendors and providing the customer with information about how to use cloud computing to support business goals. In such a scenario, the broker works with the customer to understand work processes, provisioning needs, budgeting and data management requirements. After the research has been completed, the broker presents the customer with a short list of recommended cloud providers and the customer contacts the vendor(s) of choice to arrange service.”

The primary benefit to a broker approach to cloud computing is it gives enterprise customers a single point of contact for many different cloud providers from a trusted partner. Something that lately seems to be a recurring problem and is often refereed to as “Cloud Sprawl.” By offering its army of cloud experts as well as a platform in which to manage this type of sprawl, Accenture hopes to position itself in the middle of a potentially major shift in how enterprises view and utilize IT. This is in many ways similar to the outsourcing transition that occurred in the 1990s.

According to the article, customers will be able to “buy pre- configured services from Accenture. For example, the ‘testing-as-a-service’ offering allows customers to rent testing tools on a pay-per-use basis, and spin up cloud infrastructure as a testing environment, in one fell swoop.”

“You can look at the platform as an app store, but some of the apps have been pre-integrated,” says Jack Sepple, global senior managing director for Accenture’s cloud practice. Going on to say, “In the client-server era, there was a big decentralization of governance for a while, and the same thing is happening with cloud and for valid business reasons,” says Sepple. “Part of the reason for adopting this platform is to help customers pull governance back into one place.”

Accenture has yet to announce which suppliers make up its cloud service provider ecosystem, but it has revealed one glaring omission: cloud market- creator Amazon Web Services.

AWS is “definitely on our roadmap”, Sepple says, but for the time being it does not meet the requirements of its enterprise customers. “As a Global 2000 customer, there are certain terms and conditions you expect, and certain service level agreements you need”.

The most surprising admission was that the company’s Cloud computing division is already a $1 billion-a-year business for Accenture, Sepple says, which equates to around 3.5% of its 2012 revenues. IDC recently estimated that the global cloud computing market will grow 245% from $40 billion in 2012 to $98 billion in 2016. Accenture expects its cloud business to match or exceed that growth.

There are a few other players emerging in the space including 6Fusion and the TechStars backed Cloudoptions, which hopes to apply a financial model to the brokering of cloud services. The truth is, that in order for Acccenture’s cloud broker ambitions to become a reality, they will need to create a much more inclusive approach to the use of third party services including providers such as GoogleGoogle, MicrosoftMicrosoft and Rackspace, if they hope to succeed. But regardless, this is further future proof of a multi-cloud future for IT.

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